Pragmatic competence in Spanish students of EFL: making requests and apologies

101 Pages·2016·1.56 MB·English

FACULTADE DE FILOLOXÍA

Inter-university Master in Advanced English Studies and
its Applications

Pragmatic competence in Spanish students
of EFL: making requests and apologies
Laura de las Mercedes Buján Sánchez

July 2016
It would be discourteous to start this dissertation without thanking all its contributors.
First of all, I have to acknowledge my tutor, Professor Woodward-Smith, for providing me with
the idea of this project, for guiding and encouraging me throughout its development, for her
remarkable efficiency reviewing the draft versions and for helping me find in pragmatics a
counterpart to my everlasting intrapersonal ambiguities. I am also extremely grateful to the
Spanish participants that completed the questionnaire despite being accosted during the
stressful exam period; although they would not have been as numerous without the essential
role and effort of Professor Lezcano in their recruitment. Finally, I must address a big thank
you to the British informants that responded to the online survey, taking the time out of their
busy lives to participate in a research that they will probably never have the need to consult.

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Le langage est source de malentendus.
[Words are the source of misunderstandings]
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince

I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I'm not sure you realize that
what you heard is not what I meant.
Alan Greenspan

A unified account of what language is has, I believe, been lost.
Geoffrey Leech

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ................................................................................................................................... vii
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 1
PART 1: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ......................................................................... 3
1. Pragmatics ............................................................................................................................. 3
1.1. Pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics .......................................................................... 5
1.2. Pragmatic competence ..................................................................................................... 6
1.3. Pragmatic failure ............................................................................................................. 8
2. Cross-cultural pragmatics ................................................................................................... 9
2.1. Interlanguage pragmatics .............................................................................................. 12
2.2. Methodology and data collection techniques in CCP and ILP research ....................... 15
3. Conversation, speech acts and pragmatics ...................................................................... 18
3.1. Conversational principles .............................................................................................. 18
3.2. Speech acts: requests and apologies .............................................................................. 21
3.2.1. The Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realisation Project (CCSARP) ........................... 23
PART 2: RESEARCH ........................................................................................................... 27
1. Methodology ....................................................................................................................... 27
2. Results and discussion ........................................................................................................ 31
2.1. Requests ........................................................................................................................ 31
2.2. Apologies ...................................................................................................................... 38
3. Conclusions ......................................................................................................................... 45

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PART 3: TEACHING PRAGMATICS ................................................................................ 49
1. Explicit vs implicit instruction .......................................................................................... 49
1.1. Pragmatic knowledge and implicit learning .................................................................. 51
1.2. Teaching techniques for implicit-explicit learning of pragamatics ............................... 52
CONCLUSIONS..................................................................................................................... 55
References ............................................................................................................................... 59
APPENDIX A ......................................................................................................................... 63
APPENDIX B .......................................................................................................................... 65
APPENDIX C ......................................................................................................................... 75

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Abstract
This dissertation examines the pragmatic competence of Spanish advanced learners of English
through the performance of requests and apologies. Data has been drawn from production
questionnaires by means of the elicitation of the speech acts expected. As we were interested
in the communicative effect of the utterances, a group of British informants was required to
evaluate their acceptability and/or offensiveness in order to ensure natural native speaker
reactions to the utterances produced, and therefore provide academically valid data. Due to the
input provided by these external evaluators, we have been able to reach some interesting
conclusions about pragmatic failure, that is to say, unsuccessful communication caused by
deficiencies in the students’ pragmatic competence, which are not only related to cultural
differences but also to personal traits. Hence, at the end of this dissertation we offer strategies
and techniques than can help to compensate this insufficiency by raising the pragmatic
awareness of both foreign language learners and teachers in the classroom.

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INTRODUCTION
Miscommunication or failure to communicate adequately can occur for different
reasons, but it is especially frequent in cross-cultural encounters where two people speak either
different languages or varieties of the same language. One of the reasons for this to happen is
that speakers lack what is known as pragmatic competence, the skill that allows us to express
and understand what is said beyond the words. Cross-cultural pragmatics is one of the areas of
research concerned with how people belonging to different cultural communities use language
to communicate. Interrelated (sub)branches (e.g. interlanguage pragmatics) of this field also
deal with how speakers of foreign languages convey their intended messages. This dissertation
should be considered within the recently described framework of research since our purpose is
to evaluate the communicative effect (particularly the (in)appropriateness) of a series of
requests and apologies provided by Spanish advanced learners of English on native speakers of
British English, paying special attention to pragmatic failure and its causes.
In order to achieve our goal, first, we designed a questionnaire intended to obtain
utterances from the Spanish participants through the controlled elicitation of speech acts,
namely requests and apologies. Then, from the extensive data collected, a selection of useful
items was made in order to create an online opinion poll for British informants to complete.
They had to assess, in terms of their acceptability, the utterances selected by marking a score
from one to five in a scale of values. They were also asked to give their opinion regarding their
offensiveness and to offer their own responses to the same situations. Finally, following
predominantly a qualitative approach, we carried out an analysis of the results of the online
survey from which we draw some overall and tentative conclusions.
This project is divided in four main parts. Part 1 contains the theoretical framework of
our study. It deals with pragmatics in general terms and with more specific concepts such as
pragmalinguistics, sociopragmatics, pragmatic competence and pragmatic failure (Section 1).
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It is also concerned with the cross-cultural perspective of this area of study and the different
approaches and methodologies used and available to carry out studies within this field (Section
2). In addition, as our focus in on the communicative effect of requests and apologies,
information about the principles that govern conversation and about those particular speech acts
is also included together with the presentation of a research project that combines cross-cultural
communication and the realisation patterns of requests and apologies across different languages
(i.e. the cross-cultural speech act realisation project) (Section 3). In Part 2 we present our
research. Through a clear explanation of the methodology followed (Section 1) and a reflective
discussion of the results (Section 2), we set forth the conclusions obtained (Section 3). To
complement our research on the pragmatic competence of the Spanish participants, we have
included Part 3, which is about helpful and necessary teaching techniques that foreign language
teachers can use to raise the students’ awareness of pragmatic competence and improve their
communicative skills. Lastly, we finish this dissertation with recapitulatory conclusions that
sum up the contents and ideas reflected on throughout the whole discussion.
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